Former New Orleans technology chief Anthony Jones accepted an improper gratuity from Ciber in the form of a trip to Colorado paid for by the company, according to a forensic audit performed for the Nagin administration, which Jones disputes.

Mayor Ray Nagin's administration has quietly extended a huge and sometimes-controversial computer consulting contract with Ciber Inc. of Colorado, adding $6.3 million to the deal's value.

The change, ordered earlier this month, marks the fourth time the city of New Orleans' deal with Ciber, originally signed in June 2005 and capped then at $5.5 million, has been amended. With the newest change, the contract's ceiling is now $46.2 million, more than eight times its initial value.

The contract is one of the most lucrative professional services contracts at City Hall, if not the most lucrative. City officials are not required to award such contracts to the low bidder, though they generally must invite interested parties to submit proposals.

Ciber won its original deal after such a competitive process, but since then the contract has simply been amended. City officials could not provide copies of the three previous amendments Monday.

Nagin's press office declined Monday to respond to a series of questions about the most recent amendment, which was signed July 6 and posted recently on the city's Web site.

Ciber has become intertwined with members of the Mayor's Office of Technology during a time that the office has been mired in controversy. Ciber has at times been close to the action.

For several years starting in 2004, under a separate arrangement, Ciber served as the prime contractor overseeing various firms owned or run by Mark St. Pierre that essentially ran the technology office during Greg Meffert's time as Nagin's chief technology officer.

During that time, Meffert, a city employee, was given use of a credit card and other gratuities by St. Pierre, a contractor he oversaw. After Meffert left City Hall, St. Pierre's firm NetMethods paid him nearly $600,000 in "consulting fees."

As Meffert was ladling out millions of dollars in work to Ciber at City Hall, Ciber was hiring NetMethods for various jobs in other cities.

Perhaps not surprisingly, both firms took a strong interest in re-electing Nagin. In the waning moments of the 2006 campaign, when many of Nagin's former supporters had abandoned him, St. Pierre and Ciber teamed up to boost his flagging war chest.

Ed Burns, a Ciber vice president, and St. Pierre co-hosted a fundraiser for Nagin in Chicago in May 2006, less than two weeks before the election.

By then, St. Pierre had maxed out his own contributions to the Nagin campaign, having given the maximum $5,000 donation in his own name as well as the names of two companies doing business in the city technology office, Veracent and Imagine Software. So he donated $10,000 through NetMethods to Nagin's political action committee, CHANGE Inc. Such committees are not bound by campaign contribution limits.

Ciber went a similar route, giving Nagin's PAC $25,000 -- the largest contribution it has ever recorded. Within a few days of the Chicago event, two other Ciber vice presidents had ponied up $5,000 apiece for the Nagin campaign.

After Meffert left City Hall, he was replaced by Mark Kurt, who had been employed by St. Pierre and assigned to the technology office. When Kurt left city government in early 2007, he went to work for Ciber. He had obtained an ethics opinion that said the arrangement was kosher so long as he had stayed away from the firm's dealings at City Hall.

Kurt was replaced by Anthony Jones, who has had his own controversial dealings with Ciber.

A forensic audit performed for the Nagin administration found that Jones in 2007 accepted an improper gratuity from Ciber in the form of a trip to Colorado paid for by the company. That was one of several alleged misdeeds that led city officials in March to suspend Jones, who disputes the allegation.

In explaining his decision to fire Jones two weeks ago, Harrison Boyd, the interim technology director, cited the Ciber gratuity. Boyd also blamed Jones for improperly altering two contracts under his purview: the city's deal with crime-camera provider LSI, and its contract with Ciber.

Boyd's letter said that in both cases, Jones had intentionally made "material changes to cost and performance specifications without commemorations as either formal change orders or contract amendments." The letter gave no further details.

A forensic audit on crime cameras ordered by the Nagin administration found that after LSI installed cameras Jones turned network-connection work over to Ciber by executing change orders in an unrelated contract. Ciber took cameras LSI installed for a "line-of-sight" network and redesigned the project into a "mesh" network with redundancies, so that one lost connection wouldn't disrupt the system.

Costs skyrocketed as a result, the report found, though Ciber ultimately fell short of creating a redundant system.

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Gordon Russell can be reached at grussell@timespicayune.com or at 504.826.3347.